I wonder how big the chance is that the machine is turned off in the first hour.
I use Google Compute for some personal project and the typical run time for a VM is about 10 - 20 minutes. If the vm has 90% chance to survive the first hour, it could be worth the trouble to make my process more fault tolerable.
The probability that Compute Engine will terminate a preemptible instance for a system event is generally low, but may vary from day to day and from zone to zone depending on current conditions.
Give it a shot in us-central1-a and let us know how it goes!
I couldn't figure out from the docs, can one restart a preempted preemptible instance, or needs to start a different one? Would it be possible to restart in non-preemptible mode, so the job completes but at a higher price? We still want to complete our workloads, one way or another :)
Note of course that if you got preempted because we needed the capacity back for regular VMs (as opposed to say a maintenance event) you may not be able to start a new Preemptible VM in that zone.
I use Google Compute for some personal project and the typical run time for a VM is about 10 - 20 minutes. If the vm has 90% chance to survive the first hour, it could be worth the trouble to make my process more fault tolerable.